Category: Opinion Editorial

BY JOHN STOSSEL

Small businesses are and always have been the lifeblood of any healthy economy. However, high-level cronyism increasingly threatens to stifle nascent entrepreneurs at every turn.

Every day, federal, state and local governments stifle small businesses to privilege well-connected incumbent companies. It’s a system of protectionism for influential insiders who don’t want competition. Every locality has its share of business moguls who are cozy with politicians. Together, they use the power of government to keep competition down and prices high.

The Institute for Justice, a libertarian public-interest law firm, works to free entrepreneurs from such opportunity-killing regulations. Here are four cases from IJ’s files.

Case No. 1. The monks at St. Joseph Abbey had to take the state of Louisiana to federal court to defend their right to make money selling handmade caskets. That’s right: empty wooden boxes. But as soon as the monks started selling them, they were shocked to receive a cease-and-desist order from something called the Louisiana State Board of Funeral Directors. The funeral directors had managed to get their state to pass a law decreeing that only “licensed funeral directors” may sell “funeral merchandise” like caskets.

To sell caskets legally, the monks would have to obtain a funeral director’s license. That required a year-long apprenticeship, passing a funeral industry test and converting their monastery into a “funeral establishment” by installing embalming equipment, among other things.

The state board and the Louisiana Funeral Directors Association — the profession’s lobbyist — say the law is designed to protect consumers. But that’s what established businesses always say about absurd regulations they demand. An unusually candid funeral director told The Wall Street Journal, “They’re cutting into our profit.” Well, yes, free competition does do that. That’s the point.

Another funeral director said that the law must remain unchanged because casket-making is a complicated business: “A quarter of America is oversized. I don’t even know if the monks know how to make an oversized casket.” Does that even deserve a comment?

Case No. 2. Hector Ricketts wants to offer New York City residents an alternative to New York’s slow and clumsy public transportation. He employs drivers who offer commuters rides in minivans. The vans serve mostly low-income neighborhoods and typically charge $2 a head. People like the vans. They’re more convenient than unionized government-run public transit — and cheaper, too. The subways and buses charge $2.25.

So the city’s public transit union used its political connections to regulate the vans to death: The politicians have decreed that vans may not drive routes used by city buses or provide service to a passenger unless it is prearranged by phone; and the vans must keep a passenger manifest on board and enter the name of everyone to be picked up.

“Government makes it easier to get on welfare than to grow my business,” Ricketts says.

The fight continues.

Case No. 3. Melony Armstrong of Tupelo, Miss., wanted to expand her African hair-braiding business. But Mississippi bureaucrats told her that to teach workers how to braid she needed a full cosmetology license. That required 1,200 hours of classes. Next, she needed a cosmetology instructor’s license — 2,000 more hours.

The courses and license had little to do with her profession. They were simply barriers to entry favored by her competition. Fortunately, IJ won that case.

Case No. 4. Dennis Ballen has a bagel shop located far off the main roads in Redmond, Wash. He couldn’t afford to advertise on radio or TV, so he paid someone (typically unemployable people with quirky personalities) to stand on the road with a sign directing traffic to his store. It worked. The sign brought him two or three new customers a day.

Then Redmond police slapped him with a cease-and-desist order, warning he could face a year in jail or up to $5,000 in fines if he didn’t stop displaying the sign. Ballen estimates that he would lose at least $200 a day in business if he complied. He and IJ sued the city and won the right to employ the sign-holder.

It’s great that IJ and some determined entrepreneurs win a few victories for free enterprise. But in a country with a real free market, such lawsuits would be unnecessary.

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John Stossel is host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “Give Me a Break” and of “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.” To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com

BY WALTER E WILLIAMS

Many do-gooders and race hustlers insist that the black-white achievement gap in the US today is the product of racism.  But how do you explain black students’ stellar performance during Jim Crow?

The white liberal’s agenda, coupled with that of black race hustlers, has had and continues to have a devastating impact on ordinary black people. Perhaps the most debilitating aspect of this liberal malevolence is in the area of education.
Recently, I spoke with a Midwestern university engineering professor who was trying to help an inner-city black student who was admitted to the university’s electrical engineering program. The student was sure that he was well prepared for an engineering curriculum; his high school had convinced him of that and the university recruiters supported that notion.

His poor performance on the university’s math placement exam required that he take remedial math courses. He’s failed them and is now on academic probation after two semesters of earning less than a 2.0 grade point average.

The young man and his parents were sure of his preparedness. After all, he had good high school grades, but those grades only meant that he was well behaved. The college recruiters probably knew this youngster didn’t have the academic preparation for an electrical engineering curriculum. They were more concerned with racial diversity.

This young man’s background is far from unique. Public schools give most black students fraudulent diplomas that certify a 12th-grade achievement level. According to a report by Abigail Thernstrom, “The Racial Gap in Academic Achievement,” black students in 12th grade dealt with scientific problems at the level of whites in the sixth grade; they wrote about as well as whites in the eighth grade. The average black high school senior had math skills on a par with a typical white student in the middle of ninth grade. The average 17-year-old black student could only read as well as the typical white child who had not yet reached age 13.

Black youngsters who take the SAT exam earn an average score that’s 70 to 80 percent of the score of white students, and keep in mind, the achievement level of white students is nothing to write home about. Under misguided diversity pressures, colleges recruit many black students who are academically ill equipped. Very often, these students become quickly disillusioned, embarrassed and flunk out, or they’re steered into curricula that have little or no academic content, or professors practice affirmative-action grading.

In any case, the 12 years of poor academic preparation is not repaired in four or five years of college. This is seen by the huge performance gap between blacks and whites on exams for graduate school admittance such as the GRE, MCAT and LSAT.

Is poor academic performance among blacks something immutable or pre-ordained? There is no evidence for such a claim. Let’s sample some evidence from earlier periods. In “Assumptions Versus History in Ethnic Education,” in Teachers College Record (1981), Dr. Thomas Sowell reports on academic achievement in some of New York city’s public schools. He compares test scores for sixth graders in Harlem schools with those in the predominantly white Lower East Side for April 1941 and December 1941.

In paragraph and word meaning, Harlem students, compared to Lower East Side students, scored equally or higher. In 1947 and 1951, Harlem third-graders in paragraph and word meaning, and arithmetic reasoning and computation scored about the same as — and in some cases, slightly higher, and in others, slightly lower than — their white Lower East Side counterparts.

Going back to an earlier era, Washington, D.C.’s Dunbar High School’s black students scored higher in citywide tests than any of the city’s white schools. In fact, from its founding in 1870 to 1955, most of Dunbar’s graduates went off to college.

Let’s return to the tale of the youngster at the Midwestern college. Recruiting this youngster to be a failure is cruel, psychologically damaging and an embarrassment for his family. But the campus hustlers might come to the aid of the student by convincing him that his academic failure is a result of white racism and Eurocentric values.

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Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has authored more than 150 publications, including many in scholarly journals, and has frequently given expert testimony before Congressional committees on public policy issues ranging from labor policy to taxation and spending.

BY JACOB SULLUM

A classic and cowardly defense tactic when one’s ideas have failed logically is to shoot the messenger with pointless ad hominem attacks. Let’s observe a recent example of this behavior.

Alan Simpson violated a taboo last week when he likened Social Security to “a milk cow with 310 million tits.” But contrary to the dictionary-deprived critics who accused him of sexist vulgarity, the former Wyoming senator’s transgression had nothing to do with his use of a perfectly acceptable synonym for teat. Simpson’s real sin was “belittling a bedrock program,” as the AARP put it — i.e., showing insufficient reverence for a sacred cow.

To Simpson’s detractors, it is self-evident that a man who supports entitlement reform has no business serving on, let alone co-chairing, a presidential commission devoted to fiscal responsibility. But anyone who takes an honest look at the federal budget can see how crazy that position is.

Just three entitlement programs — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — account for two-fifths of federal spending, representing 10 percent of gross domestic product. Without reform, they are expected to consume half of the budget and about 20 percent of GDP by 2050.

It’s true that the fiscal outlook for Social Security, which has about $18 trillion in unfunded liabilities, is not nearly as bad as the fiscal outlook for Medicare, which has a long-term shortfall five times as big. Simpson’s controversial comments nevertheless reflect some important truths.

First, Social Security is neither a pension fund nor a means-tested assistance program for the needy. It is a pay-as-you-go system of transfer payments that takes money from relatively poor workers and gives it to relatively affluent retirees.

Second, despite all the talk of a “$2.5 trillion surplus,” Social Security is indeed “in trouble,” thanks to a shrinking ratio of workers to retirees and repeated raids on its revenue by legislators looking for easy spending money. The year of reckoning is not 2037, when the program’s imaginary “trust fund” is expected to run out — it is now, since the cost of benefits already has begun to exceed annual revenue. There is nothing in the trust fund but IOUs from the federal government, which can be redeemed only through cuts in other programs, more taxes or more debt.

Third, entitlement reform — including Medicare cuts as well as changes to Social Security — will be fought tooth-and-nail by the AARP, the National Organization for Women and other denialist defenders of the status quo. That much was confirmed by the reaction to Simpson’s complaints about charges of “ageism” and “sexism,” which were cited as further evidence of his ageism and sexism.

Yet this self-hating senior citizen, who turns 79 this week, is right to question a retirement age that was set at 65 in 1935 and has been raised by only two years (for people born after 1959) since then. Meanwhile, life expectancy at 65 has gone from about 13 more years for men and 15 for women to 17 for men and 20 for women, and those numbers are projected to continue rising.

Simpson is also right to point out that Americans receive Social Security (and Medicare) benefits regardless of how wealthy they are. You might think progressives would welcome means testing. But as Trudy Lieberman explained in the Columbia Journalism Review, they worry that targeting benefits to people who actually need them would undermine “the program’s social solidarity.”

Translation: Voters love middle-class entitlements, but they hate welfare. That’s why progressives were so upset about Simpson’s cow comparison, with its implication of unseemly dependence. Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.,  and Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-Ore., claimed to find the simile “beyond comprehension” but nevertheless concluded that it was both “false” and “demeaning.”

Transforming Social Security into a true pension program by letting workers invest part of what they now see disappear in payroll taxes is likewise anathema to the “social solidarity” crowd, since it would let people go their own way instead of forcing them to participate in the government’s Ponzi scheme. Simpson is not suggesting anything nearly so radical, which makes the silly, sanctimonious storm over his comments all the more depressing.

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Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine, and his work appears in the new Reason anthology Choice (BenBella Books). Sullum is a graduate of Cornell University, where he majored in economics and psychology. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.

BY  WALTER E WILLIAMS

Cheaper prices on various goods and services from around the world are generally a good thing for American consumers. So why is it that so many ‘free trade’ advocates see this as unfair?

At first blush, the mercantilists’ call for “free trade but fair trade” sounds reasonable. After all, who can be against fairness? Giving the idea just a bit of thought suggests that fairness as a guide for public policy lays the groundwork for tyranny. You say, “Williams, I’ve never heard anything so farfetched! Explain yourself.”

Think about the First Amendment to our Constitution that reads: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

How many of us would prefer that the Founders had written the First Amendment so as to focus on fairness rather than freedom and instead wrote: “Congress shall make no unfair laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the fair exercise thereof; or abridging the fairness of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people to peaceably assemble in a fair fashion, and to fairly petition the Government for a redress of grievances”?

How supportive would you be to a person who argued that he was for free religion but fair religion, or he was for free speech but fair speech? Would you be supportive of government efforts to limit unfair religion and unfair speech? How might life look under a regime of fairness of religion, speech and the press?

Suppose a newspaper published a statement like “President Obama might easily end his term alongside Jimmy Carter as one of America’s worse presidents.” Some people might consider that fair speech while other people denounce it as unfair speech. What to do? A tribunal would have to be formed to decide on the fairness or unfairness of the statement.

It goes without saying that the political makeup of the tribunal would be a matter of controversy. Once such a tribunal was set up, how much generalized agreement would there be on what it decreed? And, if deemed unfair speech, what should the penalties be?

The bottom line is that what’s fair or unfair is an elusive concept and the same applies to trade. Last summer, I purchased a 2010 LS 460 Lexus, through a U.S. intermediary, from a Japanese producer for $70,000. Here’s my question to you: Was that a fair or unfair trade? I was free to keep my $70,000 or purchase the car. The Japanese producer was free to keep his Lexus or sell me the car.

As it turned out, I gave up my $70,000 and took possession of the car, and the Japanese producer gave up possession of the car and took possession of my money. The exchange occurred because I saw myself as being better off and so did the Japanese producer. I think it was both free and fair trade, and I’d like an American mercantilist to explain to me how it wasn’t.

Mercantilists have absolutely no argument when we recognize that trade is mostly between individuals. Mercantilists pretend that trade occurs between nations such as U.S. trading with England or Japan to appeal to our jingoism. First, does the U.S. trade with Japan and England? In other words, is it members of the U.S. Congress trading with their counterparts in the Japanese Diet or the English Parliament?

That’s nonsense. Trade occurs between individuals in one country, through intermediaries, with individuals in another country.

Who might protest that my trade with the Lexus manufacturer was unfair? If you said an American car manufacturer and their union workers, go to the head of the class. They would like Congress to restrict foreign trade so that they can sell their cars at a pleasing price and their workers earn a pleasing wage.

As a matter of fact, it’s never American consumers who complain about cheaper prices. It’s always American producers and their unions who do the complaining. That ought to tell us something.

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Walter E. Williams is a professor of economics at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. He has authored more than 150 publications, including many in scholarly journals, and has frequently given expert testimony before Congressional committees on public policy issues ranging from labor policy to taxation and spending.

BY JACOB SULLUM

When it comes to the First Amendment, there is no restriction on who may publish information. Why, then, has Wikileaks been targeted so aggressively by the US government?

Despite Vice President Biden’s recent squabbling with Republican senators over the meaning of Christmas, he and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell do agree on something. They both say WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has published thousands of confidential Pentagon and State Department documents on his group’s website, is “a high-tech terrorist.”

But assuming that President Obama is not ready to drop a bomb on Assange, punishing him for disseminating military records and diplomatic cables will require specifying what crime he committed under U.S. law. That won’t be easy, unless the Justice Department is prepared to criminalize something journalists do every day: divulge information that the government wants to keep secret.

Last week, Assange’s lawyer claimed a grand jury has been convened in Alexandria, Va., with the aim of indicting him. But under what statute?

The most obvious possibility is the Espionage Act of 1917, which makes it a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison, to “receive,” “deliver,” “transmit” or “communicate” any “information relating to the national defense” that “the possessor has reason to believe could be used to the injury of the United States or to the advantage of any foreign nation.”

In spite of the law’s sweeping language, it has almost always been applied to government employees who leak information, as opposed to people who receive it and pass it on.

The one exception was the 2005 indictment of two former pro-Israel lobbyists who were accused of receiving and disclosing classified information about U.S. policy toward Iran. Their source, a Pentagon official, was convicted under the Espionage Act, but the case against them fell apart after the judge ruled that the government would have to show they knew their disclosures were unauthorized and might damage national security.

Assange could be prosecuted even under that reading of the law, and so could all the news organizations that ran stories about the WikiLeaks documents. But the government has never used the Espionage Act to prosecute a journalist, which is what Assange claims to be.

His critics disagree. “WikiLeaks is not a news organization,” writes Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen. “It is a criminal enterprise. Its reason for existence is to obtain classified national security information and disseminate it as widely as possible. … These actions are likely a violation of the Espionage Act, and they arguably constitute material support for terrorism.”

There is a circular quality to this argument: Assange is not a journalist because he’s a criminal, and he’s a criminal because he’s not a journalist. But for constitutional purposes, it does not matter whether Marc Thiessen, Attorney General Eric Holder or anyone else considers Assange a journalist.

“Freedom of the press” does not mean the freedom of those individuals who are lucky enough to be officially recognized as members of the Fourth Estate. It means the freedom to use technologies of mass communication, which today include the Internet. This freedom does not amount to much if the government can deny it to someone by questioning his journalistic credentials.

The government could try to avoid First Amendment problems by accusing Assange of conspiring with Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst who is charged with leaking the Pentagon and State Department documents.

Such a conspiracy could be a crime under the Espionage Act or the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, which prohibits disclosure of sensitive national defense or foreign relations information obtained through unauthorized computer access. But so far no evidence has emerged that Assange was any more culpable in the leaks than a reporter who receives confidential information from a government source.

There is another way to stop anger over the WikiLeaks document dumps from turning into an assault on the First Amendment. Assuming the allegations against Manning are true, the government should be asking why its own data security practices are so shoddy that a single low-ranking soldier with computer access was able to divulge such a huge trove of supposedly secret information.

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Jacob Sullum is a senior editor at Reason magazine, and his work appears in the new Reason anthology Choice (BenBella Books). Sullum is a graduate of Cornell University, where he majored in economics and psychology. He lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and daughter.

BY THOMAS SOWELL

If you happen to be stuck for last-minute holiday gift ideas for the rational thinkers in your life, these books carry a wonderfully weighty endorsement!

It is hard to come up with Christmas gifts for people who already seem to have everything. But there are few — if any — people who can keep up with the flood of books coming off the presses. Books can be good gifts for such people.

Among the books I read this year, the one that made the biggest impact on me was New Deal or Raw Deal by Burton Folsom, Jr., a professor at Hillsdale College. It was that rare kind of book, one thoroughly researched by a scholar and yet written in plain language, readily understood by anyone.

So many myths and legends glorifying Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal administration have become part of folklore that a dose of cold facts is very much needed.

The next time someone repeats one of the many myths about FDR, or tries to use the New Deal as a model of how we should try to solve current economic problems, whoever reads this book will have the hard, documented facts with which to shoot down such claims.

The Myth of the Robber Barons

Another book by the same author was published this year — the 6th edition of The Myth of the Robber Barons. When I have asked people, “Just whom did the robber barons rob?” I have never gotten an answer. This book shows why.

Apparently the real sin of the so-called “robber barons,” like that of Wal-Mart today, is that they charged lower prices than their competitors, many of whom went out of business because they were not efficient enough to be able to bring down their prices.

A book more focused on our contemporary culture is Spoilt Rotten! by Theodore Dalrymple. Its subtitle gives its theme: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality. Dr. Dalrymple sees sentimentality as not just a silly foible but as a serious danger to government policy-making, as well as a corruption of personal relations.

 

A new book on the New York Times by award-winning journalist William McGowan is titled Gray Lady Down: What the Decline and Fall of the New York Times Means for America.

The New York Times is not just another newspaper. It has long been a major influence on the rest of the media and on public opinion, so its degeneration into a propaganda publication in recent years is a national tragedy. McGowan spells it all out in plain words and with numerous examples.

The fact that the New York Times has lost both circulation and credibility is its problem. The fact that America has lost a once reliable source of news is a national problem.

I don’t usually read autobiographical books but two very good ones came out this year. My favorite is Up from the Projects by economist, columnist and personal friend Walter Williams. It is a small book with a big punch. Once you start reading it, it is hard to put down.

Up From the Projects

Up from the Projects is not only a remarkable story of a remarkable man’s life, it is the story of both progress and retrogression in the black community. Everyone wants to take credit for the progress but nobody wants to take the blame for the retrogression.

An even smaller book by a very different man in very different circumstances is Inside the Nixon Administration — subtitled “The Secret Diary of Arthur Burns, 1969-1974.” Distinguished economist Arthur F. Burns was chairman of the Federal Reserve System in those years, and these posthumous excerpts from his diary paint a chilling picture of the irresponsibility, vanity, dishonesty and incompetence in the Nixon White House.

 

This book is not just about the Nixon administration, however. It is about the ugly realities of politics behind the pious talk of “public service.” And it is about what it means to have a very strange man as President of the United States — something that is all too relevant to our own times.

Intellectuals and Society

My own new books this year are Intellectuals and Society, an account of another strange and dangerous group of people, and the 4th edition of Basic Economics, which is more than twice as large as the first edition. It has been putting on weight over the years, like its author, but the weight is muscle in the case of the book.

Basic Economics has sold more copies than any other book of mine and has been translated into more foreign languages. Apparently there are a lot of people who want to understand economics without having to wade through graphs and equations.

 

 

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Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is Intellectuals and Society, from January 2010.

BY JOHN STOSSEL

Condescending do-gooders in the industrialized world think that giving handouts to the world’s poor can alleviate any grinding poverty. This could hardly be further from the truth.

Of the 6 billion people on Earth, 2 billion try to survive on a few dollars a day. They don’t build businesses, or if they do, they don’t expand them. Unlike people in the United States, Europe and Asian countries like Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc., they don’t lift themselves out of poverty. Why not? What’s the difference between them and us? Hernando de Soto taught me that the biggest difference may be property rights.

I first met de Soto maybe 15 years ago. It was at one of those lunches where people sit around wondering how to end poverty. I go to these things because it bugs me that much of the world hasn’t yet figured out what gave us Americans the power to prosper.

I go, but I’m skeptical. There sits de Soto, president of the Institute for Liberty and Democracy in Peru, and he starts pulling pictures out showing slum dwellings built on top of each other. I wondered what they meant.

As de Soto explained: “These pictures show that roughly 4 billion people in the world actually build their homes and own their businesses outside the legal system. … Because of the lack of rule of law (and) the definition of who owns what, and because they don’t have addresses, they can’t get credit (for investment loans).”

They don’t have addresses?

“To get an address, somebody’s got to recognize that that’s where you live. That means … you’ve a got mailing address. … When you make a deal with someone, you can be identified. But until property is defined by law, people can’t … specialize and create wealth. The day they get title (is) the day that the businesses in their homes, the sewing machines, the cotton gins, the car repair shop finally gets recognized. They can start expanding.”

That’s the road to prosperity. But first they need to be recognized by someone in local authority who says, “This is yours.” They need the rule of law. But many places in the developing world barely have law. So enterprising people take a risk. They work a deal with the guy on the first floor, and they build their house on the second floor.

“Probably the guy on the first floor, who had the guts to squat and make a deal with somebody from government who decided to look the other way, has got an invisible property right. It’s not very different from when you Americans started going west, (but) Americans at that time were absolutely conscious of what the rule of law was about,” de Soto said.

Americans marked off property, courts recognized that property, and the people got deeds that meant everyone knew their property was theirs. They could then buy and sell and borrow against it as they saw fit.

This idea of a deed protecting property seems simple, but it’s powerful. Commerce between total strangers wouldn’t happen otherwise. It applies to more than just skyscrapers and factories. It applies to stock markets, which only work because of deed-like paperwork that we trust because we have the rule of law.

Is de Soto saying that if the developing world had the rule of law they could become as rich as we are?

“Oh, yes. Of course. But let me tell you, bringing in the rule of law is no easy thing.”

De Soto started his work in Peru, as an economic adviser to the president, trying to establish property rights there. He was successful enough that leaders of 23 countries, including Russia, Libya, Egypt, Honduras and the Philippines, now pay him to teach them about property rights. Those leaders at least get that they’re doing something wrong.

“They get it easier than a North American,” he said, “because the people who brought the rule of law and property rights to the United States (lived) in the 18th and 19th centuries. They were your great-great-great-great-granddaddies.”

De Soto says we’ve forgotten what made us prosperous. “But (leaders in the developing world) see that they’re pot-poor relative to your wealth.” They are beginning to grasp the importance of private property.

Let’s hope we haven’t forgotten what they are beginning to learn.

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John Stossel is host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “Give Me a Break” and of “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.” To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com

BY THOMAS SOWELL

When the government talks about taxing the wealthy, the net result is usually a disincentive to work and produce to the best of one’s ability. So why is this rhetoric so perennially popular?

Let’s face it, politics is largely the art of deception, and political rhetoric is largely the art of misstating issues. A classic example is the current debate over whether to give money to the unemployed by extending how long unemployment benefits will be provided, or instead to give “tax cuts to the rich.”

First of all, nobody’s taxes — whether rich or poor — is going to be cut in this lame duck session of Congress. The only real issue is whether our current tax rates will go up in January, whether for everybody or nobody or somewhere in between.

The most we can hope for is that tax rates will not go up. So the next time you hear some politician or media talking head say “tax cuts for the rich,” that will just tell you whether they are serious about facts or just addicted to talking points.

Not only are the so-called “tax cuts” not really tax cuts, most of the people called “rich” are not really rich. Rich means having a lot of wealth. But income taxes don’t touch wealth. No wonder some billionaires are saying it’s OK to raise income taxes. They would still be billionaires if taxes took 100 percent of their current income.

What those who are arguing against “tax cuts for the rich” are promoting is raising the tax rates on families making $250,000 a year and up. A husband and wife making $125,000 a year each are not rich. If they have a kid going to one of the many colleges charging $30,000 a year (in after-tax money) for tuition alone, they are not likely to feel anywhere close to being rich.

Many people earning an annual income of $125,000 a year do so only after years of earning a lot less than that before eventually working their way up to that level. For politicians to step in at that point and confiscate what they have invested years of working to achieve is a little much.

It also takes a lot of brass to talk about taxing “millionaires and billionaires” when most of the people whose taxes the liberals want to raise are neither. Why is so much deception necessary, if your case is good?

Those who own their own small businesses have usually reached their peak earnings many years after having started their business, and often operating with very low income, or even operating at a loss, when their businesses first got started.

Again, having politicians step in with an extra tax at that point, when later incomes compensate earlier sacrifices, is sheer brass — especially when real millionaires and billionaires have their wealth safely stowed in tax shelters.

Another fashionable political and media deception is making a parallel between giving money to the unemployed versus giving money to “the rich.”

When you refrain from raising someone’s taxes, you are not “giving” them anything. Even if you were actually cutting their tax rate — which is out of the question today — you would still not be “giving” them anything, but only allowing them to keep more of what they have earned.

Is the government doing any of us a big favor by not taking even more of what we have worked for? Is it not an insult to our intelligence to say that the government is “giving” us something by not taxing it away?

With unemployment compensation, however, you are in fact giving someone something. “Extending unemployment benefits” always sounds good politically — especially if you do not ask the basic question: “For how long should they be extended?” A year? Two years? No limit?

Studies have shown what common sense should have told us without studies: The longer the unemployment benefits are available, the longer people stay unemployed.

If I were fired tomorrow, should I be able to live off the government until such time as I find another job that is exactly the same, making the same or higher pay? What if I am offered another job that uses some of the same skills but doesn’t pay quite as much? Should I be allowed to keep on living off the government?

With the government making it more expensive for employers to hire workers, and at the same time subsidizing unemployed workers longer and longer, you can have as much unemployment as you are willing to pay for, for as long as you are willing to pay for it.

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Thomas Sowell is a Senior Fellow at The Hoover Institution at Stanford University in California. He has published dozens of books on economics, education, race, and other topics. His most recent book is The Housing Boom and Bust, from April 2009.

BY JOHN STOSSEL

Many see the privatization of public parks as an evil encroachment by the rich in the public sphere. In reality, privatized parks today are friendlier and more inclusive than ever.

America is filled with parks that are filthy, dangerous and badly maintained. The governments in charge plead: We can’t help it. Our budgets have been slashed. We don’t have enough money!

Bryant Park, in midtown Manhattan, was once such an unsavory place. But now it’s nice. What changed? Dan Biederman essentially privatized the park.

With permission from frustrated officials who’d watch government repeatedly fail to clean up the park, Biederman raised private funds from “businesses around the park, real estate owners, concessions and events sponsorships. … (S)ince 1996, we have not asked the city government for a single dollar.”

Sounds good to me. But not to Shirley Kressel, a Boston journalist.

I asked her what’s wrong with getting the money from private businesses, as Dan does.

“Because it goes into private pockets,” she said.

So what?

“Because it’s very good (for Dan) to use the public land for running a private business, a rent-a-park, where all year ’round there’s commercial revenue from renting it out to businesses. He keeps all that money. People don’t realize that.”

So what? I don’t care if they think the money is going to Mars. The park is nice, and people don’t have to pay taxes to support it.

The park is certainly more “commercial” now. The day I videotaped, there were booths selling food and holiday gifts. The public seemed fine with that.

Biederman is not finished with his efforts to save public parks. He next wants to apply his skills to the Boston Common. The Common is America’s oldest public park, and like many others, it’s largely a barren field. Biederman doesn’t want to seek business funding, as he did with Bryant Park, because the area is not as commercial. Instead, he would combine the Bryant Park and Central Park models.

I know something about Central Park because I’m on the board of the charity that helps manage it. When government managed Central Park, it was a crime zone. Now it’s wonderful. Those of us who live near it donated most of the money that renovated and now maintains Central Park. It’s not a business arrangement.

Kressel says she’ll fight Biederman’s plan for Boston.

“(W)e don’t need … to teach our next generation of children that the only way they can get a public realm is as the charity ward of rich people and corporations,” she said. “We can afford our public realm. We’re entitled to it. We pay taxes, and that’s the government’s job.”

The Central Park model “doesn’t work for 98 percent of the country,” she added.

I don’t know what’ll happen to the rest of the country, but it’s working in Central Park. Why not try it in Boston? It’s working for the public.

“It’s not, because these people, the money bags, get to decide how the park is used and who goes there and who the desirables are and who are the undesirables. Undesirables are primarily homeless people. … Homeless people have to be somewhere. If we don’t make a system that accommodates people who don’t have a place to live, they have to be in the public realm.”

Biederman has a ready answer: “We have the same number of homeless people in Bryant Park today as we had when it was viewed by everyone as horrible in the early 1980s. What we didn’t have then — and we have now — is 4,000 other people. The ratio of non-homeless to homeless is 4,000 to 13 instead of 250 to 13.

So any female walking into Bryant Park who might have in the past been concerned about her security says, ‘This doesn’t look like a homeless hangout to me.’ The homeless people are welcomed into Bryant Park if they follow the rules. And those same 13 people are there almost every day. We know their names.”

Once again, the creative minds of the private sector invent solutions that never occur to government bureaucrats. If government would just get out of the way, entrepreneurship and innovation, stimulated by the profit motive, will make our lives better.

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John Stossel is host of “Stossel” on the Fox Business Network. He’s the author of “Give Me a Break” and of “Myth, Lies, and Downright Stupidity.” To find out more about John Stossel, visit his site at johnstossel.com